Email this to a friend

Specifications

Expert's Rating

OVERALL

Price when reviewed

£159 inc VAT

Geared toward the needs of a mid-volume home or small office (printing dozens, not hundreds, of pages per week), the Officejet 6700 Premium inkjet performs quickly and produces decent text and photos. Its inks, especially colours, are affordable in their high-yield versions.

The HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One is a triple treat, interface-wise: USB, ethernet, and Wi-Fi are all present. Setup is easy, and the software is the usual competent but easy-to-use HP suite, including optical character recognition.

The control panel is a 2.65-inch touchscreen colour LCD with additional touch controls to each side. The only nontouch control is the power button. A USB port on the HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One's front allows you to offload scans or perform direct printing. See also: Group test: what's the best multifunction printer?

Highlights in paper handling include a roomy 250-sheet bottom-mounted paper tray (most of its competitors have 100- or 150-sheet trays) and a 75-sheet output tray, plus automatic duplexing. The flatbed scanner platen is your typical letter/A4-size offering, but the 35-sheet automatic document feeder above it can scan legal-size media and capture both sides of a two-sided document (one side at a time). Telescoping hinges for the scanner cover/ADF are the only things we missed in the HP Officejet 6700 Premium e-All-in-One's paper handling.

The OfficeJet 6700 Premium's speed is peppy for the price range: In our tests the OfficeJet 6700 Premium reached a medium-fast rate of 10 pages per minute printing plain text on the PC and Mac platforms, and it posted average or faster speeds printing photos and colour graphics. Only its scanning was significantly more sluggish than average.

Though the scans are slow, at least they look good: fairly accurate in colour, not too choppy or dark. Print quality disappoints at default settings on plain paper, as text appears dark charcoal rather than black and slightly soft around the edges, while colour images look orangey and fuzzy. Switching to a finer quality mode for text and photo paper for colour improves matters considerably (and uses more ink). The draft mode is both faster and more readable than most.

The Officejet 6700 Premium uses a four-cartridge ink system that's costlier than average with the standard-capacity supplies, but considerably cheaper than average with the high-capacity cartridges. The normal £15 black that lasts for 400 pages works out to a rather pricey 3.7p per page. The £11 cyan, magenta, and yellow last for 330 pages, or 3.3p per page. That's a slightly above-average 14p per four-colour page.

The high-yield cartridges include a 1000-page black for £15, or 1.5p per page, and 825–page colours for £23 each, which works out to 2.7p per page. That makes for a far more affordable, 9.6p four-colour page. Text pages still cost about twice what you'll pay with fancier models such as the HP Officejet Pro 8600 Plus.

OUR VERDICT

Though the HP Officejet 6700 Premium falls a bit short in scanning capabilities and ink costs, it's otherwise a capable midpriced inkjet MFP. A similarly priced competitor, the Brother MFC-J825DW, offers CD/DVD printing and a two-year warranty (compared to the HP's one), but it also has a lower paper capacity and some higher ink prices.

Email this to a friend

Find the best price

Trending Stories

Comments

naveenraj said: Comments,naveenraj,Its great.... I purchased this product a week ago. Install was simple and easy and worked wireless and USB just fine. Scan worked very well--quite fast either wireless or USB...HOWEVER...

Steven Tracey said: Comments,Steven Tracey,Frustrating. Took my unit back to John Lewis who replaced under guarantee but same problems - wifi simply doesn't work reliably and the printer goes offline after a job, requiring a restart nearly every time. Hopeless - especially when homework needs printing out and it's my fault the printer doesn't work. Looks like the replacement will be going back shortly. BTW The HP online help is utterly useless.

MJ said: Comments,MJ,I just purchased a replacement printer at Costco and the initialization process is a nightmare. Stuck on a loop doing a demo of ink installation and will not move past!! One hour later and I am packing it up and returning it to Costco.,..totally frustrated! Will not buy the same machine!

Maxwell said: Comments,Maxwell,Piece of crap. I should've read the Amazon reviews before I bought it. As several people commented, the printer usually refuses to wake up. Print jobs sit in the print queue and printer does nothing. I have to resend the job multiple times or more often re-start the printer. My wireless router is about 12 inches away from the printer so the connection is fine. All the features in the world don't matter if the printer won't print when you ask it. How do companies like HP survive in this day and age turning out products that simply don't work?

Chris said: Comments,Chris,I bought one yesterday, and took it back 3 hours later.. It refused to accept the password to my BT Home Hub 3, even though we checked many times, even took security off of the Home Hub.